The Winter Serpent

by Maggie Davis

Reviewed by David Maclaine

The Winter Serpent
is a novel that continually defies expectation. It is the story of Doireann, an
orphaned young woman whose father was a Scottish chieftain and whose mother was
a noble Pict. Sold by an unfriendly relative to a band of Northmen, she must
adjust to a forced marriage in an alien culture, and later becomes embroiled in
the schemes of factions from both Celtic peoples, Scots and Picts, where her
role in the succession makes her valuable. Her pride and force of will are the
only counterforces to the desires of the men who seek to bend her to their own
ends. All these elements might serve for a standard-issue romance, or for a
screed against a system that allowed so little choice to women. But the novel
offers neither the romantic conventions of the sadly anti-feminist decade of
the 1950s during which it was written, nor the dogmatic slant one might expect
had it been written a couple of decades later. Nor does the construction of the
story, its pace and rhythm, follow the predictable shaping of suspense and
action found in most popular fiction. It is a finely crafted novel, written as
any literary work of the 1950s might be, but with its protagonist a woman of
more than a millennium ago.

Author Davis
provides a unique interpretation of the Norse berserker tradition, as well a
portrayal of Celtic society at the close of the eighth century which feels
authentic. The famous raid on Lindisfarne abbey, a thunderclap announcing the
coming storm of the Scandinavian onslaught on Western
Europe, is a crucial offstage event in The Winter Serpent. But while Davis
sets her story during the beginning of a great clash of cultures, her chief
focus is on a particular woman’s struggle to shape her own fate. (1958, 300
pages)

The Soul Thief by Cecelia Holland (2002), historical fantasy about a Viking who sets out to rescue his abducted sister, who has been purchased by a sorceress who caught a glimpse of her using magical powers; #1 in the Soul Thief series. See review or more info at Amazon.com